A culture of innovation
By sharing our expertise with our business customers, Glanbia Nutritionals is helping to power their innovation and grow their brands.
Glanbia’s expertise can offer a fundamental boost to a food and beverage business, especially one exploring new protein sources. Niall McGrath and Tom Gannon, co-founders of break-Cali Cali Foods, approached the team at Glanbia Nutritionals for help with their new protein bars.
Plant-based food has been a supercharged trend in recent years, with the size of the global plant-based food market forecast to be $77.8 billion by 2030 (1). But Tom and Niall knew that if they brought a bar in, “[it] had to be 100 percent different to whatever else was in the market.”
“Taste was absolutely the biggest challenge,” says Niall. “To get a neutral tasting, vegan protein was super difficult – we’ve been on the hunt for that for four or five years.”
Glanbia suggested a pea protein called BarHarvest. “It contains elements which make Cali Cali bars softer and very different to other protein bars out on the market,” says Niall. “The texture is phenomenal.”
That gave the bars their point of difference. The next problem was: how do you make a pea protein bar delicious and healthy?
“We have access to a library of 20,000 flavours through Foodarom®, one of four key recent acquisitions for us,” says Loren Ward, Chief Innovation Officer, Glanbia Nutritionals. “We tailored the flavour to the protein, which works much better than just dropping in a standard flavour.”
The result? “A great-looking, great-tasting bar with fantastic ingredients,” Niall says.
Innovation scale and reach
The work with Cali Cali Foods took place at one of Glanbia’s growing network of innovation and collaboration centres, where customers can work in person with Glanbia’s scientists and proprietary technology.
“There were seven Glanbia Nutritional innovation centres in 2018. Now there are 15,” says Loren. “Our footprint extends from Ireland, Germany and Italy to North America and Asia.”
“We have a new centre in Singapore, a new lab in China and we are getting ready to put capabilities into Japan. In Europe we remodelled, renovated and expanded our Kilkenny lab and in North America we have new facilities in Twin Falls so we can dig deeper into extrusion, confectionary and flavour,” he says.
The expanding global network serves two purposes says Brian Phelan, CEO of Glanbia Nutritionals – showing not only that Glanbia is ready to collaborate with customers in their own territories but also that it can match their ambitions to grow internationally.
“The customer is at the core of Glanbia Nutritionals. We want to bring our unique access to ingredients and deep innovation capabilities to wherever they are,” Brian says.
How Glanbia Nutritionals cuts prototyping from weeks to days
With customers onsite, ready to give feedback, optimising ingredients and flavours can be rapid – critical for customers on a time crunch or launch deadline.
“Over three days recently we were able to put together 30 prototypes for a global F&B manufacturer wanting to develop their bakery, confectionary and snacking areas,” says Loren. “We refined results to just a handful they wanted to move forward with. That saved at least half a year of back-and-forth and development time.”
More than just saving time, however, the work at innovation centres is leading to a different kind of conversation with customers. “We are invited to be part of their innovation days and are being brought into the conversation around: ‘This is what we are planning to do. How can you support us around that?’” Brian says.
“There is an inherent R&D journey of getting functionality and taste, which Glanbia Nutritionals has really helped us with,” says innovation centre customer Pat Cavanaugh, the founder and CEO of Ready Nutrition. “The term ‘partner’ is used in the business world today that is just a replacement, in my opinion, for ‘supplier’. What we learned in that first project with Glanbia is that, from our perspective, Glanbia epitomises a true partner.”
The level of support on offer is unrivalled. As well as manufacturing know-how – such as getting ingredient consistency from batch to batch and providing reliable shelf life – Glanbia’s technological expertise ranges from deep knowledge of protein chemistry to a peptide carrier system that delivers amino acids for muscle growth or stress relief, to a method of microencapsulating vitamins and minerals in a product so they can co-exist without degrading.
Just as important, however, are the trend-forward insights innovation centres can offer into what consumers are excited by. “The guys have gone over and above doing a lot of market research for us across all of the UK,” says Tom at Cali Cali Foods.
“They weren’t just trying to sell us raw ingredients, they were trying to look holistically at the problem, then help us to sell it in,” Niall adds. “So, we sell more, we buy more. And that works for everyone.”
Learn more about innovation at Glanbia here.